It seems almost counterintuitive, another idea dreamed up by the people who have been trying to kill amateur boxing for years. Eliminate headgear, which has been protecting amateur fighters for three decades nowIJ OK, and while we’re at it why not do away with padded gloves and fight with bare knuckles.
Sure enough, though, the headgear is going. Before the year is out, young fighters throughout the world will meet in the ring and be able to recognise the face they’re trying to hit.
That will make for more attractive fights, might even safely secure the Olympic future of a sport that was very iffy in the games for a while. Coupled with a pro-style scoring system, it surely will restore some semblance of a combat sport to what had become fencing with gloves.
It would also seem, at least on the surface, to be inherently more dangerous. The padding has been there since the 1984 Olympics, and for a reason. It’s supposed to act as a cushion for blows to the head, protecting fighters from concussions and even worse.
Those who run amateur boxing say the headgear doesn’t really work, and may even add to the danger. It encourages fighters to take more blows, they say, and interferes with peripheral vision needed to see a left hook or right cross.
But no one can say for sure.
“It’s not really clear until you basically eliminate headgear and see what happens,” said Dr. Charles Bernick, who heads a study on brain damage in fighters for the Cleveland Clinic lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in las Vegas. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t a big difference with or without headgear.”
It’s a bold move by the International Boxing Association, an organisation once so corrupt that boxing was almost thrown out of the Summer Games. Under the new leadership of President Wu Ching-Kuo of Taiwan — now a member of the powerful IOC executive board — boxing is doing its best to become relevant as an Olympic sport again.
last year, women boxers competed for the first time in the Olympics and were a smashing success. But the men have been mostly an Olympic afterthought for years, and something had to change.
The large padded headgear made fighters look alike to fans. You can hardly even see their eyes. The computerised scoring where knockdowns didn’t count any more than jabs- introduced in the wake of the Roy Jones Jr. fiasco in Seoul in 1988 — took the essence out of the sport.
The science of blows to the head and their effect on athletes is an evolving one. Only in the last few years — largely prompted by the NFl’s concussion debate — have doctors begun to study it closely. There’s still no firm evidence why some athletes take repeated blows to the head and are fine, while others end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a variant of which has always been called “punch drunk “in boxing circles.
Everyone is guessing, and now they’re guessing about headgear.
Boxing is inherently a dangerous business, of course. Has been since long before the Marquess of Queensberry rules were adopted in the late 1800’s to control some of the madness in the sport.
Eliminating headgear won’t take the sport back to its heyday, when the Golden Gloves was big and Olympic boxing even bigger. It may, however, put it back in the Olympic spotlight and help create a new generation of boxing fans.
Hopefully, it won’t be at the cost of even more brain injuries. AP